Published: 11 February 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
ON MONDAY MORNING Nadav Kaplan, 75 – a historian, businessman and colonel in the Israel Air Force reserve – reported to the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, sitting as the High Court of Justice. So will members of the Shin Bet security service, among them “Roni,” the code name for the director of the agency’s heritage department. Before a panel of three justices, headed by Supreme Court President Esther Hayut, this group will try to go back 63 years, to one of the most turbulent, sensitive and painful affairs in Jewish and Israeli history.
A little after midnight on March 4, 1957, Israel (Rudolf) Kastner – journalist, official in the trade and industry ministry and a member of Mapai, the forerunner of today’s Labor Party – was shot and wounded outside his home in Tel Aviv. Less than two years earlier, the Jerusalem District Court had ruled that Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil,” by collaborating with the Nazis. Kastner was admitted to a hospital in the city, where he died a few days later under still-mysterious circumstances.
Kaplan, who investigated the episode and made some discoveries regarding possible Shin Bet involvement in Kastner’s death, petitioned the High Court to demand the unsealing of still-classified documents held by the Shin Bet and the Israel State Archive.
In its response to the High Court, published here for the first time, the state argues that making the documents public, even decades after the affair, could still endanger national security.
FULL STORY What does the Shin Bet have to hide? High Court to hear Kastner affair (Haaretz)
Photo: Israel Kastner at Kol Yisrael, early 1950s (Wikimedia Commons)
